Transforming Christian Theology

Is there a role for Christian theology in the ongoing transformation of church and society? How can the reflective imperative of Christian discipleship support a transformative vision of the world?

This compact volume offers a way for Christians to reflect deeply on how best to conceive Christian identity, commitment, and discipleship in today's challenged, globalized, pluralistic scene. Growing out of the recent "Rekindling Theological Imagination" initiative and led by esteemed theologian Philip Clayton and his colleagues, this volume seeks to capture and articulate the ferment in grassroots North American Christianity today and to relate it directly to the recent strong resurgence of progressive thought and politics. It argues strongly for a mediating role specifically for Christian theology, conceived first as a life practice of Christian discipleship, and its call has found enormous response from popular audiences in conferences, online, in informal Christian settings, as well as in mainline denominations and the academy.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright

Contents

Foreword

When I was a pastor—and had a pastor’s expense account—I
subscribed to the flagship magazine of liberal Protestantism
and the flagship magazine of conservative Protestantism. I
just wanted to keep up-to-date with both sides. ...

Preface

Christian language is alive and well in the churches—and sometimes
outside them as well. But deep reflection about this language is in
trouble. These pages offer a radical call to pastors and laypeople to
transform theology as we know it today. ...

Introduction: Getting Clear on What You (Really) Believe

When I pick up a book, I wonder about the author: Who is she?
What’s her background? More importantly, I want to know:
Why did he write this book? What does he have to tell me?
What can I learn from him? Life is short, so I want to know
these things up front. Presumably you do as well. ...

Part One: Theology for an Age of Transition

1. Things Have Changed, or “Toto, We’re Not in Kansas Any More”

Over the last years all of us have watched the geography of the
American church undergo a radical transformation. It’s almost as
if there has been a major earthquake—or, more accurately, a series
of major earthquakes—realigning the entire landscape in which
we live. It reminds me of pictures of the San Andreas Fault in California. ...

2. Do Christians Have to Hate Change?

As hard as it can be to cope with it, change is good! The stereotype
says that until you’re thirty you make change, and from thirty
on you fight it. It’s certainly true that older people tend to be in
charge of organizations, and organizations are often the major
blocks to change. But the stereotypes don’t quite fit. ...

3. Why the Answers Must Be Theological (and What That Means)

Every Christian has a theology. For that matter, so does every Jew
or Muslim or Hindu. A theology, in the broadest sense, just means
what you believe about God (theos). Tragically, theology somehow
got turned into a professional sport—a move that produced many
of the negative tendencies that we already know from professional sports in
America (except for the high salaries). ...

4. Postmodernity Makes Theologians of Us All

In part 3 we will look at the new social and cultural resources available
to genuinely transformative theologies, including the new forms of
social networking that led to the election of President Barack Obama.
This radical morphing of the American public square won’t go away
because technologies never go backwards; ...

5. Postmodern Believing

Outside of the world of conservative evangelicals, many American
Christians seem to have some pretty serious problems saying what
it is that they believe with all their heart, soul, strength, and mind.
We act as though we’re really unsure what sorts of things (outside
of science and common sense) ...

6. “Everything Must Change”

These new conversations are happening all around us today. They are crucial
because the world is changing rapidly and radically. If we’re going to speak
and live Jesus’ message in a relevant and powerful fashion, we have to find
new ways of going about it. Many of the Christian structures we’ve inherited
from past generations aren’t up to the task. ...

7. Managing Change

Change can be managed—but only when it is acknowledged,
accepted, and embraced. Parents, for instance, are constantly managing
change, sometimes caused by major transitions in the family’s
history (moves, job changes, divorces, deaths in the family),
and sometimes by the radical transitions that children go through as they
age. ...

Part Two: Theologies That Can Transform the Church

8. Don’t Give Up on the Church!

As we’ve seen, mainline churches today are facing a crisis greater
than at any time since the founding of Christianity in the United
States. These churches, once the staple of American religious life,
have undergone a steady decline in membership for over four
decades, and the situation has now reached a critical point for many mainline
denominations. ...

9. Transformative Theologies

Faced with the challenges outlined in the previous chapter, one
is inclined to a rather dark view of future prospects for mainline
churches. Here’s what the dark view looks like: the church trains its
best and brightest candidates for ministry in seminaries, giving them
three years of academic course work and, usually, some sort of internship
experience. ...

10. Learning to Find Your Theological Voice

There’s a widespread misconception that you have to leave your
everyday world and go away somewhere in order to work out your
answers to questions about religion and faith. In fact, the most
common misconception is that you have to go away to seminary. ...

11. Theology as Telling the Story

Modern assumptions are clearly part of what’s getting in the way
of developing vibrant theologies for our day. Remember: in
the modern paradigm, one’s beliefs must fit together into a
system of propositions—a system that builds up from indubitable
foundations through logical inferences to conclusions that should
be compelling for all rational agents. ...

12. Theologies in Action

Theology starts, I’ve argued, with exploring the intersections between
my story and God’s story. It includes bringing to the surface the deep
assumptions I’ve already made about who God is and testing them
against the four sources of Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. ...

13. A Theology of Self-Emptying for the Church

Theologies always involve the weaving together of God’s story and
one or more human stories. In Christian theologies, Jesus’ life
and teaching play a central role in the resulting narrative. We’ve
explored in more general terms what theologies are and aren’t. ...

Part Three: Theologies That Can Transform Society

14. New Partnerships in Christian Activism

Great, so you have a new vision for Christian theology. You are
learning to blend your life story with the narrative of God in
Christ. You can begin to connect the Seven Core Christian Questions
with significant events in your life. And, together with others,
you’re ready to sketch a theological vision that has the potential to
transform the church. ...

15. Time to Leave behind Old Liberal/Evangelical Battles

We have chronicled the shift from modern to postmodern ways
of thinking. We have seen what it means to practice Christian
discipleship using the “Belonging, Behaving, Believing”
method, and we’ve contrasted this method with the exclusionary
way of thinking that typified the modern world. ...

16. From Church Ministries to Missional Churches

We’ve made a good start. Subdividing the church into the
opposing camps of liberals and conservatives and then allowing
them to engage in a fight to the death was a recipe for
disaster. However, the rethinking has to go much, much
deeper. ...

17. Social Transformation without “Us versus Them”

Christians still want to make a difference in the world. It’s our calling,
and our passion. Yet now it’s a different world than the one for
which most of our established ministries were designed. How are we
going to transform it if we don’t understand it? ...

18. Constructing Theologies of the Community for the Community: The Six Steps

In this chapter I offer six steps for developing Christian theologies
that support social transformation. In the past, the standard way of
describing the task has been to create a theology for Christian involvement
in broader society. The trouble is that each of those words carries
baggage; the connotations point in the wrong directions. ...

19. Toward a Progressive Theology for Christian Activism

Now you know how to do it. What do the results look like? How
do progressive theologies actually function? What are they based
on, and what do they affirm? What can they accomplish? We will
close with concrete examples of how a progressive theology can
be grounded in Scripture and how it can speak powerfully and prophetically
to today’s world. ...

Part Four: Conversations Worth Having

Transforming Christian Theology does not seek to have the last
word. It’s meant to function as the invitation to a passionate dialogue
about theology and the way it shapes our life together as
individuals and the church. Just because we do not offer a theology
for you to sign on to does not mean we don’t have beliefs. ...

Conversation 1. Choice, Convictions, and Connections

In his upcoming book, American Grace: How Religion is Reshaping
Our Civic and Political Lives, Robert Putnam demonstrates how, from
the 1990s to today, the polarization and politicizing of religion has led
an increasing number of young people to reject religion and its institutions,
generally taking the attitude, “If this is religion, I’m not interested.”1 ...

Conversation 2. Barriers to Belonging

Denominational Christianity in America no longer functions as the
thoroughfare of Christianity, or even spirituality, in the ways that
it once did. Like the great American car industry in Detroit, the
denominations have found themselves no longer to be the only
game in town. ...

Conversation 3. Toward a Progressive Missiology

What’s our mission as the church? Theologian John Cobb
believes it to be, “working with God for the salvation of the
world.”2 That is one serious task. But to really understand
our mission we need to move past a couple possible misunderstandings. ...

Welcome to Project MUSE

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